Tag Archives: Shadowdark

Cyclopean Skeleton

A random thought on a Shadowdark creature and the loot it may leave behind.

An animated skeleton with a glowing gem set in its forehead.

AC 15 (chainmail + shield), HP 11, ATK 1 longsword +1 (1d8) or 1 javelin (far) +0 (1d4), MV near, S +1, D +0, C +2, I -2, W +0, Ch -1, AL C, LV 3

Undead. Immune to morale checks.

Reflecting Cabochon. First hostile spell with a spellcasting check less than 20 is reflected at caster.

Reflecting Cabochon

A one-inch gem polished to a mirror sheen.

Benefit. When struck by hostile spell, destroy reflecting cabochon and roll DEX (DC equal to spellcasting check result). If you’re a spellcaster, may choose to make spellcasting check instead. With success, reflect spell at original caster.

Con Report: CharCon 2025

This was my second consecutive year of attendance at CharCon, a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, WV. My 2024 report is here, and most of my observations about the venue, vendors, and surrounding area remain applicable for 2025.

As noted last year, the venue is shared with a science center. Some clever individual in the con staff made the decision to put the cosplay tables (and photo backdrops) right at the main entrance so all the kids (and their parents) coming to the science center could encounter the cosplayers as soon as they hit the doors. Bonus points to the Twi’lek X-Wing pilot and whoever brought the life-size remote-controlled R2-D2.

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Skunk Curse

As noted in yesterday’s session writeup, I took a swing at homebrewing a Shadowdark creature to give my orcs a little magical support. This was loosely based on the core book’s kobold sorcerer, with some orcish flavor:

These were nasty opponents, made all the more so by the PCs’ focus on their screening mooks. This let them keep casting Wolf Call for several unimpeded rounds, and the wolf spam threatened a TPK at one point.

I only got one Skunk Curse off, and I giggled far more than I should have when describing its effects.

Chapter [$undefined]: Tomb of the Dusk Queen

After a thoroughly enjoyable demo game of Shadowdark at RiverCityCon a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to start a side campaign with the usual suspects. This will likely involve most or all of the players from Kaserne on the Borderlands, and perhaps a few others from the same friends circle, but not all at once. Somewhere West of Light, as I’m calling it, will be a pick-up game – either “we don’t have a quorum for a scheduled Twilight: 2000 session” or “I’m bored, can I get three to five players for a dungeon?” It may wind up being West Marches-ish. I’ll be chronicling it here, both for my own memory and for entertaining my three loyal readers. Don’t expect writeups to be as in-depth as what I do for Kaserne, though.

We did a dry run tonight with four players. I threw together a set of level 1 pre-gens, and my players chose:

  • Pryist, goblin wolfchild, priest of Memnon
  • Worluck, human minstrel, warlock of Kytheros
  • Nyte, halfling amnesiac, Knight of St. Ydris
  • Baarrd, elf scholar, bard

(I may have been giggling like a twelve-year-old as I rolled up and named a score of disposable PCs.)

For our test-run adventure, I grabbed the free Foundry pack community content pack and selected Sersa Victory‘s Tomb of the Dusk Queen. It’s a delightfully tightly-written dungeon, and I suspect I’ll be buying more of that author’s content in the near future. Module spoilers behind the cut:

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Con Report: RiverCityCon 2025

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: RiverCityCon, despite the name and host city, is not a successor to RiverCon. Whereas the latter con (and its shorter-lived successor, Conglomeration) was a general fantasy/SF con with a gaming track, RiverCityCon is a board game con that wedges TTRPGs into the cracks around its founders’ main focus. It’s a Louisville-based spinoff of the older Lexicon, which, as the name suggests, started in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago.

Because it’s in our city of shared origin, the Louisville Gaming Mafia used last year’s inaugural RiverCityCon as a found-family reunion. We put it to the same use again this year, and as far as that goes, it satisfied our purposes adequately. Absent that, as a con fitting my own purposes, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it.

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